Review What You’ve Written Regularly

Linking to your own content can be the best way to involve your readers in everything else you’ve done. But you can’t link to other posts that you’ve written unless you know what else you’ve written.

I would suggest browsing your own archives on at least a monthly basis. It may sound tedious, but if anyone should know your content best, it should be you. If you know your own content, you will be able to know when your new content crosses paths with past writings.

The very idea of a link is to provide solid and interesting content, so just be sure that you’re linking back to worthwhile content and not just linking for the sake of linking.

Probably the best way to link to other posts of yours it to do it discretely, and not draw too much attention to the fact that you wrote it. They will (hopefully) find out soon enough.

Make your own lists. There are bound to be lists of posts that will be pertinent to you and not to your readers. I’m talking about lists like “posts that never took off”, “posts that belong in a series”, or “posts that received a lot of comments”.

Add links later. This may sound like an odd idea, but especially if you consider removing the timestamp on your posts, think about going back later and adding in relevant inline links. Just be sure that your edits are minor, and that your links truly do make sense where they’re placed.

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8 Responses to “Review What You’ve Written Regularly”

Simonon October 05, 2008 10:42 am

Strongly agree with this post. The benefits of cross-linking in generating internal links using keyword driven anchor texts do lead to SEO advantages and their benefits should not be ignored!

AndyBargeryon August 17, 2007 3:58 am

Hi there, good post. I’ve found linking to other posts within my site has helped to improve page views and sometimes AdSense clicks. I agree, it’s important to have strong categories, specifically fewer and more targeted categories for your niche. Not always easy to achieve.
Cheers,
Andy

DayJobNukeron August 16, 2007 1:57 pm

I clicked and read the categories post. Now I’m off to get rid of my multiple categories in some of my posts.

Mike Panicon August 16, 2007 9:33 am

Thanks for the reminder, I had been meaning to do this for a while.

Jeremy Steeleon August 16, 2007 7:55 am

Keeping good categories helps, but don’t go too overboard with it. A bit annoying to look at a blog with a different category for each post.

One thing I did was create a recommended articles post, basically a list of the most popular articles on my blog (been meaning to update that list). I’ve found that quite a few first-time visitors look at that post, which is linked to from my sidebar.

Danielon August 16, 2007 5:47 am

A good practice is not only to add internal links to new posts, but also to check the archives and add links to older posts.

Good points Ryan.

Transcriberon August 16, 2007 5:43 am

Right said, internal linking should be the last process just before posting, if required, with minor editing.